The world is a very big place. This is easy to forget when you're in a rut and don't know what to blog about, or what subject to start a new website project about. But subjects are truly infinite. And with the incredible number of people online, so are the potential audiences.

I've been reminded of this recently.

I was in France for the past few weeks spending time with my wife's family. My thirteen year old nephew spent a lot of time playing a game called Minecraft. As someone who spent a great deal of his own childhood playing computer games, I certainly understand how easy it is to get obsessed with a video game. Instead of writing it off as a silly thing, I watched him build his worlds in this game, and interact with them. Through him, I learned that there's an enormous community of people who are obsessed with this building game. In fact, the number of people who use this game is currently a staggering 10 million. And almost 3 million people have bought the game. The facebook group is over a million strong. Now that's a niche!

In chatting with him, I also discovered that he wants to learn how build software. So we chatted about that a while. He's been learning CSS, HTML, and even some PHP. What do you know? He's got an uncle who does exactly what he aspires to do. I showed him some of our stuff, and walked him through our latest project, Shareist.

He even set up his own shareist website about the subject of, you guessed it, Minecraft hints and tricks.

He's already started creating his own tutorial videos. His first one is here about creating an automatic sugar cane farm on Minecraft.

If this strikes you as silly, you're missing the point. There are 10 million people out there who do find this interesting. To get just a small percentage of that traffic is a huge opportunity.

Check out the Google insights page about minecraft which hasn't even launched officially yet.

If my nephew gets the point, soon enough, he'll be turning his passion into something that's productive in him learning about building websites, online marketing, making videos, learning about web development, and even making some money.

I think he's got serious potential. I wish I was doing this stuff at 13.

And what's the take-away? Pay attention. Niche ideas are everywhere.